9 Writers Who Preferred Writing Longhand To Typing It Out On Modern Technology

Writing unlike how the outside world perceives, is a tough job. Making the other feel something through the world you’ve built and the words alone is a formidable task. Some of the greatest writers had some tricks up their sleeves.

To ensure the quality of work they preferred writing longhand to typing it out.

#1. Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri is old school when it comes to writing. The author of Namesake believes she writes better with a pen than typing it on a computer. She then transfers the text to a computer.

#2. George Clooney

#3. Quentin Tarantino

Tarantino is known for his cult movies and he prefers his screenplays handwritten. In fact, he has a strange ritual that all of us can hope to emulate. In an interview with Reuters, he said, “My ritual is, I never use a typewriter or computer. I just write it all by hand. It’s a ceremony. I go to a stationary store and buy a notebook – and I don’t buy like ten. I just buy one and then fill it up. Then I buy a bunch of red felt pens and a bunch of black ones, and I’m like, ‘These are the pens I’m going to write ‘Grindhouse’ with’.”

#4. Joyce Carol Oates

If you love reading horror and supernatural that will give you the chills, Oates is an author you cannot miss. She prefers writing all her novels in longhand to typing. Weird in this day and age, hey, but it works for the readers.

#5. Neil Gaiman

The Anansi Boys author is a fan of fountain pens. Again, like Tarantino, he follows a ritual. He loves the routine of refilling ink in the pens. He prefers longhand to typing it out because it forces him to plan his sentences out before putting them on paper. Thus skipping the process of editing out huge chunks of texts from a word document. And yes, he has a collection of 60 odd fountain pens.

#6. Stephen King

The horror writer is brilliant at what he does and some credit does go to his mode of writing. Like the other authors, he prefers long handwriting as it forces him to draft his sentences in mind before writing it down, thus ensuring that each word on the page has a purpose.

#7. Jack Kerouac

#8. Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway preferred pencil to his typewriter. In his memoir, A Moveable Feast, he mentions, “The blue-backed notebooks, the two pencils and the pencil sharpener (a pocket knife was too wasteful), the marble-topped tables, the smell of cafe cremes, the smell of early morning sweeping out and mopping and luck were all you needed.”

#9. J. K. Rowling

Rowling is known for planning her plots and character immensely. She even creates an elaborate color-coded chart for her novels. She is pretty traditional in her writing, she prefers to write down her novels before typing them out.